Surgery at Biltmore: A 120-year-old statue gets a new arm

Asheville ceramic artist Alex Irvine created and attached an arm that was damaged on a statue on the South Terrace of the Biltmore Estate.
Angeli Wright, awright@citizen-times.com

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Ceramic artist Alex Irvine works to attach a custom arm he made to replace a broken one on a replica of French artist Antoine CoyzevoxÕs sculpture, "Flore et LÕamour" (Flora and Love), on the South Terrace of the Biltmore House as preventative conservation specialist Kara Warren watches and provides insight on Thursday, June 21, 2018. (Photo: Angeli Wright/awright@citizen-times.com)Buy Photo

ASHEVILLE - Surgery is underway on the terrace just south of Biltmore House. A woman named Flora, who's about 120 years old but looks much younger, is having her right arm reattached.

The operation has been in planning and preparation for many months, but this particular Thursday is the big day, and surgeon Alex Irvine is ready. He'll be working in the summer heat, under a cloudy sky, with a constant flow of visitors looking on.

In fact, Irvine is an Asheville ceramics artist, the patient a sculpture titled "Flore et L’amour" (Flora and Love) bought by Biltmore's founder, George Vanderbilt, probably just a few years after the estate opened in 1895. It's one of four ceramic statues of mythological figures at the corners of the home's enormous terrace, three of them based on marble originals by French artist Antoine Coyzevox. All were imported from France.

When Flora lost her arm isn't known for certain. "A long time ago, 40-50 years," says Kara Warren, preventive conservation specialist at Biltmore. "The estate did a (nonceramic) replacement in the early 2000s, but it deteriorated and became damaged, and we decided to replace the whole thing rather than try to repair it."

In metaphoric terms, the first prosthetic wasn't as sophisticated as the new arm, didn't age well and didn't fit the young woman as comfortably as it should have. Although he had never done this exact operation before, Irvine was just what the doctor ordered.

"We work with a number of local artists," Warren says, since Biltmore prefers to hire Western North Carolina talent "if at all possible." In this case, she says, "I didn't know if we could do a ceramic repair. It's not something I'd seen before" — and she's been at Biltmore 14 years.

Why the procedure is tricky

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Ceramic artist Alex Irvine works to attach a custom arm he made to replace a broken one on a replica of French artist Antoine CoyzevoxÕs sculpture, "Flore et LÕamour" (Flora and Love), on the South Terrace of the Biltmore House on Thursday, June 21, 2018. (Photo: Angeli Wright/awright@citizen-times.com)

Exploring local options, Biltmore reached out to Odyssey Clayworks, the educational pottery studio and gallery in the River Arts District. Irvine, who created and installed the ceramic female figure at the center of the "Daydreamer" mural on the north side of the Aloft hotel in downtown Asheville, got involved last October through Odyssey.

It was quite a challenge for the artist: The original arm was long gone, the means to attach a new arm wasn't clear and whatever he sculpted out of clay would shrink when fired, so he had to create an arm about 10 percent bigger than the final limb needed to be.

"It's kind of tricky," he says, with characteristic understatement. "The arm's got to look like it grew off that body ... It can't be like a chicken wing or something."

The restoration team got lucky when they removed the previous, deteriorated arm: The hollow statue held firmly secured metal rods, likely installed for the previous repair, to which the new arm could be safely attached. Another local artisan, metal fabricator Bill McElrath, of the Arden-based company ISM, helped construct and install a sturdy new armature to support the new arm from within the statue.

Irvine's next challenge: Match the color and surface texture of the original statue. While all the clay that becomes ceramics is "just dirt that's been heated up," he says, "I'm not in France and I don't know where they dug that hole" that produced the original statue.

His solution was to use a terra sigilotta surface on the arm, a technique dating back to the ancient Greeks that uses a layer of super-refined clay to provide a soft sheen in lieu of a glaze. To get the color right, he mixed different kinds of clay and mason stains until he got what he wanted.

All along the way, "it was a collaboration with Cara about picking the right materials," Irvine says, noting that the first rule of restoration is never to do anything that can't safely be undone. In another 50 or 100 years, perhaps, a new restoration crew may need to do more work on the statue, so Irvine's contribution must not affect or damage the original piece, even if the replacement arm should have to be removed.

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The arm created by ceramic artist Alex Irvine to replace a broken one on a replica of French artist Antoine CoyzevoxÕs sculpture, "Flore et LÕamour" (Flora and Love), on the South Terrace of the Biltmore House contains an internal structure he created to accept a recently fabricated threaded rod that will hold it onto the original piece. (Photo: Angeli Wright/awright@citizen-times.com)

Until this "surgery" day, Irvine worked mostly in his studio, with repeated house calls to see Flora at Biltmore. On one visit, he brought along an arm of wet clay to see how well it seemed to fit, despite its being about 10 percent larger than the final, kiln-fired arm would be. The visit enabled him to take the arm and "cut it up to fit the statue," then refine the sculpting in his studio. The final arm, which is hollow, like the original statue, was created from a cast of Irvine's second full sculpt.

Out on the terrace that June Thursday, before getting out the epoxy that will hold the limb in place for decades to come, the artist spends more than an hour making last-minute adjustments, holding the new arm up to the statue and then, in a makeshift studio space several yards away, delicately grinding the upper edge to fit the shoulder, then holding it up again.

Finally, he announces, "This is the moment of truth," and he begins the effort to attach the new arm to the metal armature jutting out of Flora's shoulder.

The on-site installation has brought out all of Irvine's ingenuity. He has built a wooden platform resembling a church's kneeling bench that's the exact height needed to support the arm while the attachment hardens in place — essentially an elaborate splint. Once the arm is attached, he uses the credit-card-size Biltmore visitor pass he wears on a lanyard to check whether the surface of the shoulder exactly aligns with the surface of the new arm.

More restorations needed

Kara Warren holds up a reconstructed "pinky" finger to the place it will be attached to the statue during the final stage of its restoration. At top left is the wooden platform built to serve as a kind of splint to hold the reconstructed right arm in place while it's being connected to the statue.(Photo: Bruce C. Steele/bsteele@citizen-times.com)

Even after the arm operation, Dr. Irvine still has procedures left to schedule. In the original statue, Flora is holding between her out-flung hands a floral garland, which Irvine has also recreated in ceramic. Created in pieces that he says will be "strung like beads" on a soon-to-be invisible metal rod, the garland will be installed later, along with the two fingers Flora is missing on her left hand.

One finger, the index finger, is original and will be carefully reattached, while the pinky finger was lost and had to be resculpted by Irvine.

The age of the statues is remarkable, as they were not created to be as eternal as marble when they were cast in the late 1800s. They weren't mass produced in the modern Franklin Mint mold, but Vanderbilt did order them out of a catalog, Warren says. "A lot of people are amazed that these are still intact."

Close looks at any of the ceramic sculptures on Biltmore's terrace will reveal a lot of patchwork done over the years, with varying degrees of success. The cherub representing "love" that shares Flora's sculpture, for example, is holding a wreath from a previous restoration. "That's staying, because it's stable," Warren says.

"These sculptures have been repaired now and again since the 1920s," she continues, "and we don't remove the repairs unless it's causing damage to the original piece. We just consider it a part of the history of the piece."

Past fixes, unflattering as they may be, are like the blemishes any 120-year-old might be expected to have — "battle scars," as the saying goes.

The standard for this latest project is much higher than that, however: When finished, Irvine's work should be largely invisible to the casual visitor. "This replica looks much better than the previous repair," Warren says.

There's a reason for that: The estate has been careful to devote the time and resources necessary to make it just right. Not even including early discussions of what might be possible, the project has taken at least nine months, a seemingly symbolic period for giving Flora new life.

As the arm attachment proceeds, Warren takes the role of the expectant father during a long labor, attentively watching Irvine work and ready to steip in to help in any way she can. "This has been a really fun project," she says, one eye on the patient.

Irvine has been pleased with the collaboration, which has involved many more Biltmore staffers and consultants than are mentioned here. "It was nice working for a client who wasn't going to cut corners," he says. "And it's not a bad job site."